Recession Fuels Ethnic Violence

Fear That They, The Foreigners, Will Worsen A Bad Situation Prompts Europeans To Acts Of Hatred, Homicide.

November 24, 1992|By Richard O'Mara, Baltimore Sun

LONDON — Fear is riding in the cockpit of Europe as the worst recession in half a century grinds on. Everywhere people are alarmed by the atrocities

of extremists, incidents of growing frequency that, for some, recall the dangerous days of the 1930s.

Xenophobia flourishes, stimulated by the widespread perception that Europe is about to be engulfed by refugees from the continent's south and east and from Africa and Asia.

Nothing reflected that fear so clearly as Monday's arson attack in the west German town of Moelln in which three people of Turkish nationality burned to death. It was the worst episode of violence against foreigners since Germany reunited in 1990.

''This is a terrible experience for every law-abiding and decent person in Germany. In fact, I can say it is a disgrace for our country,'' German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said.

Germany is not alone.

- In Britain, hard times have triggered racist attacks on blacks and West Asians, resulting in the deaths of six Asian men. Last week, the Home Secretary decided to ban more than 170 Bosnian refugees, women, children and elderly approved by the Red Cross as ''victims of war with terrible need.''

- In France, the political process contends with Jean Marie Le Pen, who has raised his right-wing National Front party to prominence by blaming everything from unemployment to social malaise on Arabs - some immigrants, many French born.

- In Italy, the right-wing Lombard League has suggested the country be cut in half, rich north from poor south, sort of like the rest of the United States divorcing Mississippi and Alabama. Alessandra Mussolini, Benito's granddaughter, strives to make fascism fashionable again as a member of parliament, representing the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

- In the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, right-wing violence is common in urban slums.

And lately, attention has turned to another country previously not much noticed in this context, but the country that gave fascism its longest period of legitimacy in this century, Spain.

Nearly two weeks ago four masked gunmen burst into an abandoned discotheque in a Madrid suburb and shot to death a homeless immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Lucrecia Perez, and seriously wounded another. The killers, according to Madrid's civil governor, belonged to a Spanish neo-fascist gang.

Thus, Spain is experiencing the same anxieties as Germany, France, England, Italy and all the rest. Unemployment is climbing. The recession's grip tightens.

Clearly there is cause for unease, though not panic. Hugh Mial, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, said that voting for established right-wing extremist parties in Western Europe has increased in the past few years, but not alarmingly.

Le Pen's National Front, which claims 14 percent of France's national vote, advanced only 4 percentage points in four years. It took the right wing German Republikaner Party six years to move from 3 percent of the national vote to its current 8 percent.

''There has been gradual growth over the years,'' he said, ''not very dramatic, but in the context it's a pretty solid group of people who are supporting fairly unacceptable policies within the democracies.''

They remain tiny minorities. But some of them are violent. Europe, in fact, is virtually tyrannized by its violent minorities.

Thus, parallels are drawn with the 1930s, that era of depression when demagogues stoked people's darkest instincts and the world drifted into war. Many in Europe remember those days, which is why so many are so scared.

Academics and diplomats tend to discredit such comparisons; they emphasize instead the great differences between then and now, the anti-racism marches, the reactions of right-thinking Europeans.

In terms of the violence, ''we're still talking about people measured in the thousands rather than in the tens of thousands,'' said Christopher Husbands, an expert on right-wing extremism in Europe.

''As long as that persists it remains a police matter, rather than a political matter.''

The most significant lesson of the 1930s that seems to have gone unlearned in Europe is how to respond to governments that use force to get their way. Thus, Europe's faltering approach toward the crisis in the former Yugoslavia could be the most dangerous lapse yet.

A wider war would be just the thing to raise the level of fear throughout Europe even higher. Not to mention the level of guilt.